World War II Online is a Massively Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter based in Western Europe between 1939 and 1943. Through land, sea, and air combat using a ultra-realistic game engine, combined with a strategic layer, in the largest game world ever created - We offer the best WWII simulation experience around.

For the first time in years, the game works flawlessly in Linux!

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So, I've been a player since late 2007, and for most of this time, Linux has been my primary desktop. From 2008-2011 or so, it was possible to make WWIIOL run on Linux using a package called Wine which simulated a Windows environment. However, since mid-2012(?), there have been a variety of problems that have prevented the game from running.

Until now!

Valve has been working on a version of Wine for Steam that they call Proton, with the goal of getting as many Steam titles as possible playable on Linux transparently. Ie, they just work. This is part of their 'Steam Play' initiative to make most titles completely cross platform.

I tested WWIIOL via Steam, and it worked perfectly. I played for nearly an hour - long enough to realise how out of practice I am after all these years.

I've submitted a report to ProtonDB to give WWIIOL a 'Platinum' rating (https://www.protondb.com/app/251950). It won't show until the next content refresh (hopefully tomorrow).

I'd encourage more people to try it, if you have a Linux machine.

As for the non-Steam version, it currently won't connect to the Auth server from the login screen. Offline play works perfectly... I'd love to get the standalone copy running so I can play with my 'Caydel' account instead of the new one I made for Steam.

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Sounds good I''ll try it out on SuSe, haven't played game since some of the recent updates on Linux looks like a good time to do some testing. At one time long ago i had it running without Wine or any other program.

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As for the non-Steam version, it currently won't connect to the Auth server from the login screen. Offline play works perfectly... I'd love to get the standalone copy running so I can play with my 'Caydel' account instead of the new one I made for Steam.

The auth part has to do with playgate.exe
But at the moment, i do not have a good suggestion for getting it to understand the networking in wine.
Steam does not use playgate.

I think the eventual idea is for the organic version not to need it anymore either

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Yeah, the Playgate issue was a blocker for years. Suddenly it works... who am I to complain?

Ok, it's not quite flawless - using Steam's Proton, all the positional audio is reversed. Using vanilla wine, the positional audio just doesn't work at all - all sounds play on both channels at full volume.

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Ok, it's not quite flawless - using Steam's Proton, all the positional audio is reversed. Using vanilla wine, the positional audio just doesn't work at all - all sounds play on both channels at full volume.

I am assuming this is with DX9.0c installed on both?
Under proton, can you reverse the audio channels, or out in linux/steamOS itself

I'm not sure if you use Lutris at all, but it's basically a managed gaming platform for Linux that lets people write installers for games. The Wine support is useful as the requirements and tweaks for different games might be incompatible with eachother - this lets you have different environments per game. Anyways, I've written an Lutris installer for the standalone (ie., non-Steam) version that could use some testing: https://lutris.net/games/world-war-ii-online/

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I'm not sure if you use Lutris at all, but it's basically a managed gaming platform for Linux that lets people write installers for games. The Wine support is useful as the requirements and tweaks for different games might be incompatible with eachother - this lets you have different environments per game. Anyways, I've written an Lutris installer for the standalone (ie., non-Steam) version that could use some testing: https://lutris.net/games/world-war-ii-online/

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VirtualBox has terrible performance, especially with graphics. It really takes a lot of system overhead.

Not sure how you envision using Docker. I suppose someone could build a Docker container with Wine and WWIIOL for distribution, wouldn't be that hard to write. I guess the main benefit is you wouldn't have to install anything new on your system (if you have Docker already anyways)... but running a Docker container isn't 'free' in terms of resources. You would get better performance just running directly on your system.

Really, if you are running Linux already, running on Wine (either Steam's Photon or vanilla Wine, or Wine via Lutris) is gonna be about as low overhead as you can get.